CHRIS PRATLEY

"The "ship early, ship often" school. This is the one that most client software that Microsoft makes has followed. The theory goes that if you try to plan too much before you ship your first product (wait until its “perfect”), you will not be able build a truly useful product since you don't really understand who your future users are yet and what they will find appealing in the product. So the best thing is to get something out there, understand what is appealing and what isn't from the “early adopter” feedback, then ship another version that responds to that feedback as soon as you can. Typically, version 2 starts before the feedback from version 1 comes in, so version 2 is usually a polish of the partially misguided version 1, and version 3 is the real re-work to make the product what its prospective customer base really wants. This is where the "Microsoft doesn’t get it right until version 3" axiom comes from. One strength of this school is that it generally beats out the "wait until its perfect" school in the Darwinian world of the free market, since it gets access to real world feedback and goes through more generations than the "perfection" approach does, resulting in a product optimized for real customers sooner." - Chris Pratley